CATHOLIC ARTIFICIAL SORROW FOR SIN

THE ESSENTIALS

God for religious people is that which you can allow to be the be all and end all. But the problem is this is impossible. That is why it is never possible to prove that anybody however holy is not an idolator.  In fact we prove they must be.  It is idolatry to say you are connected to God as in relationship when you cannot be. 

Let us talk about contrition for sin. Catholics say perfect contrition is uniting yourself totally in a relationship with God with selfess love for him and it removes sins.  Anything with another motive is imperfect contrition.  Only a priest who absolves you from sin with God's power can free you from sin if your contrition is less than pure.

Somebody said, "Perfect contrition was when you were sorry for your sins because you were so upset at hurting God - who is love." That is wrong. Perfect contrition is perfectly unconcerned with what is in it for yourself. You reject sin for God's sake and not at all because sin hurts you or you feel terrible at what you did to God.

It is obvious that perfect contrition is a trick for it is clearly impossible. It is easy to think, "I choose goodness even if I have to be tormented by Satan for all eternity over it as long as it is the right thing to do. I choose it for God's sake." But that is self-deception. It is arrogant too, Nobody can be that good. Perfect contrition is not Biblical either. The Church invented it to avoid being accused of terrorising dying people who could not get a priest to forgive their sins. The theory is that perfect contrition absolves your sin even without a priest as long as you would confess your sins and take absolution if a priest was there. The terror is still there for it stands to reason that there can be no certainty of forgiveness without perfection contrition and knowing you really are perfectly contrite is impossible. Not only that it is a lie.

Perfect contrition is a way of condoning sin.  For example, if you commit some terrible sin say sacrilege or abortion or mass murder then God should only forgive you if you come with perfect contrition.  What do we in fact have? Somebody gets forgiveness from the priest with a flimsy repentance that has little love for God.

ANALYSIS

The Church says mercy is only for those who will not abuse it and will not be given if you only want it to do further wrongs. But what if you are the kind of person who means it at the time and five minutes later is back to square one? That is what happens so the Church teaching on forgiveness does not really do any good.
 
Contrition means repenting for the love of God and for his sake alone – this is called perfect contrition. Imperfect contrition means repenting for the love of God and some other reason. Attrition means repenting without any concern for God at all but just concern for yourself or because you want rid of the feeling of shame. If you resolve to get forgiveness for sin and not to sin again simply because you want something from God say health or his blessing or are afraid of eternal damnation that is attrition too.
 
The Church says that a sincere act of perfect contrition made by the dying person is not as good as confession for he has to intend to confess if he is able and since the sacrament can forgive sins even without perfect contrition it is more powerful and trustworthy than it. The problems are that it is easy to make an act of perfect contrition which implies that you hate sin so much that you would do anything to make up for it and avoid it and then one hour later you find that you are sinning again which shows that you were only deluding yourself. Confession is the only way to be sure you are really forgiven (page 14, Confession Quizzes to a Street Preacher, Fr Carty or Question 831, Radio Replies, Vol 1). This seems like magic but Rome is compelled to teach it for it says imperfect contrition can only help you if you go to confession. It puts disposition and sincerity in second place to a ritual for even if there is doubt about the sincerity of the penitence a ritual isn’t going to make any difference for it can’t work without penitence! You can delude yourself with imperfect contrition and attrition as well as perfect contrition – in fact more easily -so the confessional does not afford any greater certainty. This shows that if Jesus gave power to forgive sins to the apostles that they could only use it when the Holy Spirit told them that the person was in the right spiritual state to receive absolution which would indicate that it was the apostles power alone and could not be passed on.
 
The insistence on confession is occultism. It also suggests that Protestants who do not have confession know in their hearts that they might not be forgiven at all despite the promise of Christ which would make them to be self-deceiving hypocrites. What kind of Church would tell a dying man, woman or child that their salvation is not very certain when the priest won’t be able to make it in time? The Church may not say that to them when they are lying there dying but it says it to them in life.
 
If Catholics are so sorry for sin and want rid of it to please God then what are they going to the priest for forgiveness for? When we hear that priests can forgive sins for God we get uncomfortable for we sense the absurdity of this not to mention the blasphemy. We sense that it is not really God forgiving us.
 
The Church teaches that God cannot pardon a sin unless you regret having done it and earnestly resolve never to do it again. The moment you have perfect contrition your sins are forgiven but you still have to go to confession to tell your sins.
 
The Church imagines that references to half-hearted repentance refer to attrition in the Bible (Hosea 6:1-4; Matthew 3:7-12; Luke 15 – see New Catholic Encyclopaedia). But the references only say that people changed for selfish reasons and do not mention any concern for God or the soul. Attrition would have to relate to making peace with God for selfish reasons and there is no hint of it or of any approval of it in the Bible.
 
Imperfect contrition and attrition only win God’s forgiveness for mortal sin during priestly absolution and no other time. Venial can be gotten rid of outside confession.
 
Imperfect contrition is an incomplete break with sin for contrition is repenting sin just for God’s sake so if you repent sin for any other reason then you are not repenting it because it is still hateful to God in so far as it is for that other reason.
 
It is held that imperfect contrition diminishes the guilt of sin without confession but confession is needed to remove it completely. It diminishes the guilt because it is part true repentance. It seems then it can turn mortal sin into venial. This view is wrong. The Church says this would be part forgiveness and God doesn’t do forgiveness like that. She says you cannot be restored to God’s friendship without confession or perfect contrition. If imperfect contrition could turn your mortal sin into venial that would be in effect reconciling you with God for venial sin doesn’t stop a relationship with God.
 
Only long experience will tell how deep your imperfect contrition or attrition is or was. In so far as you refuse to reject mortal sin purely for the love of God you are harbouring attraction for the sin. You are preferring a creature to the creator. No one can have repentance that is only a partial break with mortal sin and get absolved for it by God for that means the person is still harbouring some attachment to mortal sin. It cannot work. To say it does is to deny that God has any morals. It has to be a mortal sin to be partially attached to the sin of murder.
 
If there is no element of love for God for his own sake in the penitence then you would just be insulting him by asking for forgiveness for you are just pretending that you want it. Anything without the love is not hating the sin but the consequences. It is not repentance. To mostly love God and to have a bit of a shine for anything else in your repentance is partly loving the sin but hating the consequences too. It cannot persuade God to pardon you.
 
Imperfect contrition is not repentance at all but an insulting sham. If those who claim to have it really have it then they can drop the motive other than the love of God and make their love for God the only motive. It is a sin to offer imperfection when you don’t have to. Rome is proclaiming salvation by, in and through sin! Catholicism does not love God when it teaches that fake love is good enough for God so the motive of love for God in seeking pardon must be self-delusion.
 
The person does not want to correct the offence for God’s sake as much as he wanted to commit the sins repented for his own sake. In other words, the badness is X amount but the apology is less than X in depth and devotion. Such penitence can only be useless. It says, “I repent and I do not repent”. To offer half-repentance to God is no good for you are either repentant or you are not. It would be a sin like it would be to offer somebody a cup of wine that is half dirty water.
 
God’s gift of free will was about us being able to choose love for God or self-love. And the abuse of that gift caused evil and suffering. If God would be satisfied with attrition then he was only wasting his time giving us free will and therefore to blame for all the damage it did. To pray to him is a sin.
 
You cannot reach God unless he offers you the power to love him and offers it all the time. Suppose you are too weak to love God but do your best then you are loving him for you are doing all you can. So, there is no such thing as being unable to love God perfectly as far as the will is concerned though it might not look as if you love him. Many will abuse this doctrine and claim that they love God while living immoral lives. It is certain that those who are into religion for they think it restrains evil actions are being naïve. Religion more often that not just changes the way it looks on the outside but not the inside.
 
The Council of Trent said, “If the person in confession is sorry for sin for he will burn in Hell that will do for absolution” (Session 14).
 
It would be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit to teach that he will accept such selfishness as repentance and forgive. Jesus said that such blasphemy cannot be forgiven. Jesus said that concerning the Jews who said he was using Satan to cast out demons. Imagine how much worse it is to say that the Holy Spirit is so immoral that he forgives those who serve Satan by offering fake repentance to God!
 
The Church does not censure the belief that repenting out of the fear of punishment or repenting out of shame is enough to get you forgiven in confession (Denz 2071, New Catholic Encyclopaedia, Contritionism). But it is certain that the Church believes that imperfect contrition is sufficient in confession.
 
Better Catholics teach, “To repent of our sins merely because through them, we have lost our good name or our peace of mind is not contrition. God is the person offended, and true sorrow must necessarily have reference to the one offended” (page 319, The Student’s Christian Doctrine).
 
The Baptist endeavoured to rescue the people from repenting out of fear into repenting for the love of God (Matthew 3:7-12). This suggests that attrition is not good. The Prodigal Son rose from sorrow for sin based on how sin had ruined him to sorrow out of love for his father (Luke 15:17-19) so all attrition is good for is leading to perfect contrition.
 
Alan of Lille who died in 1202 was the first to talk about contrition and to distinguish between it and attrition (Contrition, New Catholic Encyclopaedia). This shows that the Catholics accepting attrition as sufficient is both contrary to the early traditions of the Church and a man-made doctrine.
 
Duns Scotus who died in 1308 was the first to declare that attrition was enough to gain forgiveness in confession (New Catholic Encyclopedia). No true Catholic would believe in it when it is a late doctrine. Some thought that the attrite penitent gets grace that makes him as good as contrite though not contrite. That is absurd. Attrition is attachment to sin so how could it permit more power from God into anybody’s life to sanctify that life even more? The more grace you get the worse you get as long as you stay attrite. That is because you remain attrite despite the better helps towards holiness and contrition.

St Thomas Aquinas taught that attrition cannot pardon a sin unless the person goes to confession in which the sacrament transforms it into contrition (ibid, Contritionism). But any Catholic knows by experience that no such miraculous transmutation need necessarily occur.

He believed that attrition could only forgive sin if it was taken by the penitent for contrition in good faith. It is not enough to say that attrition is enough in confession for it is the first step to contrition for it is still not contrition.

Nobody can say that attrition will save you when you mistake it for perfect contrition for perfect contrition has to do with the will and motive and if you examined yourself right you would know and have tested yourself rigorously by doing something difficult for God and if you really love God at all you will examine yourself until you are sure.

Roman Catholicism accepts imperfect contrition and forgives because of it but does not urge the penitent to strive for perfect contrition for these sins later on. To neglect that is to say, “Stuff you God, the imperfect contrition for my sins will do you fine. You are not getting any more than that.” That is insulting the pardon he gave you and when you insult something so precious that delivered you from sin you are committing a new sin that is as bad as the forgiven sins were in malice. To be ungrateful for being acquitted of murder would be as good as saying you were glad to be guilty of the murder and that would be as malicious as murdering. Perfect contrition would be the most perfect break from the sins of the past and you are refusing to make that break. It is only a waste of time absolving sins when the priest does not urge and stress perfect contrition later if it is not possible now.
 
One can only be amazed at the cleverness of the Devil if one believes in him for only he could have inspired Rome’s substitute for repentance with such a successful though not brilliant forgery of repentance.



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